Austinites! Vote for Proposition I on November 3. (What are they trying hide?)
Six Austin City Council members are campaigning against an audit of the city government they run.
Proposition I on the Nov ballot would require Austin to bring in an outside firm to regularly audit City Hall for waste. Last week, council members Vanessa Fuentes, José Velásquez, Chito Vela, Ryan Alter, Mike Siegel and Zohaib Qadri rallied against it.
Three of them (Fuentes, Vela and Alter) sit on the Audit and Finance Committee, the body that's supposed to oversee city spending.
They did vote for the city's ersatz audit earlier this year, but that’s the one shaped by the city workers' union protecting their jobs.
The main group running the campaign against Prop I is a PAC called Austinites for Equity, funded mostly by $50,000 from the city workers' union. Several of these council members know it well. In 2024, it worked to help elect or support Fuentes, Vela and Siegel. In 2025, Fuentes' own campaign gave it $6,000.
So the officials being audited, the union representing the employees being audited, and the PAC both of them have funded are all on the same side, against letting voters decide how to audit their city.